THERE WAS NOTHING romantic about living in Cortona. A hard-eyed commercial town with a history of invasions and miracles, in a glorious setting under huge skies. Its inhabitants kept up appearances, dodged taxes, berated grown-up sons and daughters unlucky enough to be still living at home—or so the stories went. At the end of each day, the passeggiata down the Via Nationale and into the public gardens was full of well-dressed, well-coiffed, gossiping groups. No black or brown people. No hijabs. No odd stranieri like me. Or, at least, not that I could see.
The ease of moving between Italy and Jordan and London was one of the reasons I had chosen Cortona. It was also less expensive for those booking my tickets, and paying me in tranches of US dollars from a safe in the Diwan. A thick wad of notes, counted out in front of me, was placed in a crested envelope each time I left.
For the first time in my life, I paid close attention to exchange rates, to the best moment to convert the dollars to euros or sterling. I was earning about the same as I would have for a similar job in Australia, irritated when my English friends said that it wasn’t nearly enough, telling me I should have sought a British agent’s advice on contracts and fees. But the agents I knew in London always spoke as if they had a special lien on the Middle East. And perhaps they did. They were the ones who had fathers who had worked for Shell, or they had studied in Beirut, or had post-doctoral offspring with summer jobs in Tel Aviv, and seemed astounded that I was working in Jordan with ‘the voice of reason from the Middle East’.
Carmen didn’t pull her punches. One night, over whisky in her house in London, she told me firmly that, of course, I was being underpaid, and that if I’d been English, I’d have doubled the fee. As I had done the deal, set the fee and nobody demurred, she was probably right. But if I was careful with exchange rates and extravagances, I would be able to live for part of the year in Italy, visiting London so I could access the British Library, and a publisher—once one was found—bringing some of my family over to visit me, and having the kind of adventure I could not have dreamed up two years before.
It was also a massive test for myself, how to gouge out a life alone. How to join the ranks of women who apparently thrive on their own, claiming eventually, some of them, that they much preferred it. Being half of a couple had its limitations, they said. I couldn’t think of many—but I had married men with brains, who taught me much and made me laugh. I had several precedents in my family of women living alone. A grandmother widowed at thirty-two, who brought up four children alone in southern Tasmania; and an adored godmother who never married, and whose life was full of intrepid travel and good works. My mother lived alone for fifteen years after my father died suddenly, sleeping with his pyjamas under her pillow, but making a new life for herself, beloved by her community and active in it.
Yet, the solitude I’d managed to arrange for myself after the failure of my long marriage was terrifying. I knew nobody in Italy except Lyndall, who had done everything possible to welcome me and make sure I was comfortable. But then she vanished, travelling as she often did, leaving me phone numbers, and passwords for the internet.
The apartment, when I arrived that April, had basic supplies in the cupboard, eggs and milk in the refrigerator, a street map of the town, guides to Cortona’s treasures and those of Florence and Siena, and bus and train timetables for getting there. There was also a thoughtful selection of books on the shelves: substantial Italian and English dictionaries; a couple of histories of the region, one Lyndall had compiled of her lectures to a group of alumnae from the University of Georgia a few years before; and novels. A Portrait of a Lady, of course, and thrillers by Andrea Camilleri and Donna Leon. And Elizabeth Bowen’s A Time in Rome, and Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato and War in Val d’Orcia, about when she and her husband threw open their Villa La Foce and farm to refugee children during World War II.
I arrived via Rome, with a bag of books, my laptop, and interviews on a USB stick, and everything I needed to keep working on the Hashemite book for the next ten weeks before some of my family and friends started arriving. I set up my desk in the window of the main bedroom overlooking the plain.
The cats stalking birds on the roof of San Domenico, and the cloudscapes, took precedence over practicalities for a couple of days—until I had to hang a load of washing on racks outside the window. I returned from the shops to find my shirts in the bushes near the church, my underclothes all over the steps below, Lyndall’s inlaid desk soaking wet and the shutters banging in the wind. I would learn to see the weather coming and to time the washing. I would learn how to cope in a tough little town.
There was a family above me whose chairs scraped audibly across the tiled floor whenever they sat down to a meal, and with whom I exchanged formal greetings every day on the street outside. In the apartment opposite lived the elderly mother of Massimo, who ran the most-favoured ristorante in town. She had helped me save my washing that first week, gathering garments I’d missed on the bushes way below. Her curiosity about me was intense and she quizzed me whenever we met at the front door. I agonised about inviting her in for a visit, and managed it only twice, trying to convey that I was una scrittice molto occupata and devo viaggiare spesso a Londra e in Giordania—but I later heard she told her son that I was writing romanzi e storie fantasiose. Which might have been a better idea.
My lack of conversational Italian was galling, and language classes would not start until summer. My schoolgirl French and German kept surfacing instead. I’d prepare a shopping list in Italian each morning but rapid Cortonese defeated me. Scusi, non capisco became my daily chant. I felt stupid and cloth-tongued. And Cortona wasn’t kind to unaccompanied women unless they were gorgeous or big spenders, neither of which I was.
Having the radio tuned to Rai 1 for news and current affairs helped, as did reading newspapers in La Saletta. Later, I’d find Italian translations of writers I knew, Graham Greene’s Fine di una storia (The End of the Affair) and short stories by Alberto Moravia Racconti romani (Roman Tales)—both difficult but fathomable if I persevered. Reading them boosted my confidence, or, more probably, my vanity, in a way everyday encounters in the streets did not.
No one yet had my landline number, so when the phone started ringing during my first week, and a voice in a strong Italian accent wished me ciao bella and benvenuto, I hung up, assuming it was a wrong number. Giancarlo Giusti persisted, bless him. An old and dear Melbourne friend, he was on the board of the Arena di Verona and now, with his wife, Ann, was living half the year in Verona. He had somehow tracked me down to invite me to the first night of Nabucco with Ambrogio Maestri in the lead role. I was to catch a train to Bologna, he said, change trains to Verona, in time for lunch, and plan to stay for a few days with them in late June. That felt like an eternity away but my gratitude for the invitation was huge.
Then it was Easter, and my first visitors, Ellie, and James, my youngest son, arrived together from London. Firm friends after a rocky start, they kept an eye on each other, and had plans to explore Cortona and perhaps see what I’d got myself into. The weather was bad on Good Friday, so we holed up in the apartment and watched from the window the Cortonese processing slowly down the hill from the Basilica Santa Margherita, umbrellas bobbing beneath banners and crucifixes.
The next day, we hiked to the Convent de Le Celle, now a small meditation retreat on the site of the 13th-century monastery of Francis of Assisi, and joined the tourists filing through his little celle, with its plank and wooden headrest. Crowds thronged the streets on Easter Day and the cafés were all full, so Ellie and James cooked swordfish from the market and a garlicky skordalia, and bought granitas from the gelateria. We joined the crowds in the square outside the Duomo, where families were congregating for Mass, which caused us to have some intense discussions about religion. I was astonished to discover they both believed in reincarnation.
I gave my upbeat reports on this being a Good Idea for All of Us. And how once the Australian schools broke up at the end of term, more family would visit, and how later in the year I would help them both come back if they wanted to—but waving them off was tough.
Next came a Melbourne friend on her way to Oxford, bringing books: Anne Carson’s Grief Lessons, her recent translation of the tragedies of Euripides, and Edith Wharton’s great satirical novel, The Custom of the Country, which I started immediately. I relished this story about a world that was rushing into modernity, about divorce, and blundering over children by self-centred Undine Spragg, who would never be free of the damage that flouting the rules had done to her reputation.
This friend set about showing me a very good time, somehow knowing where the best bomboloni alla crema and strawberry granitas were to be had. She instructed me on the workings of small town Catholicism, on the Franciscans, and the order that the Sisters of Mercy established in Cortona in the late thirteenth century. Thanks to her, I became rather attached to Santa Margherita’s foundation story.
The beautiful Margherita, a farmer’s daughter, made ‘reckless and willful’ when her father remarried, was seduced by a young lord, and became his mistress in a castle in Montepulciano, where she bore him a son. Then, one night, when he failed to come home, his dog led Margherita to where he lay, murdered in the woods. She fled with her baby son back to her family, who refused to take her in. Then, ‘with no worldly goods and in the snow’, she walked many miles to Cortona, somehow persuading the Franciscans to admit her and her son to the Order of St Francis, to pursue a life of prayer and penance.
Margherita was canonised as the patron saint of midwives and single mothers, reformed prostitutes and the homeless. She established an order of Le Poverelle then the first hospital in Cortona (still there, in the Via Maffei), and her order of Our Lady of Mercy. She is proclaimed in statues and frescoes all over the town, usually with a dog at her side. Best of all, Margherita lies incorrotto in a silver and glass casket behind the altar of the church that bears her name—up my little street to the basilica on the mountain.
The romance of Cortona I shared with visitors, and I had quite a few at first: my recently widowed cousin, Ginny; friends on their way to somewhere else, checking up on me. I showed them the sights, confided in them not at all, hoping they would report back that I was thriving. I saw my visitors off at the station, a brave grin in place, and caught the bus back up the hill, scared stiff of the solitude that was awaiting me.
A survival plan for these weeks was essential, and took the form of a strict routine. The new version of the book was taking shape and I began each day early with a couple of hours at my desk. Then it was coffee and the newspapers at La Saletta, a minuscule amount of food shopping, then, by midday, I would be at my desk again. At four, I would put on my boots and walk very fast, a rhythm in my head, usually up the steep path to the top of the hill. I visited the tiny black incorrotto saint if the church was open, irritated whenever I found anyone else there.
Then out through the nearby gate, along one of the roads to the cemetery, or down the hill to the Diocesan Museum, and a 13th-century painting on wood of the saint in her blue and brown robes, and Fra Angelico’s glorious Annunciation; or to one of the twelve churches, the Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca, the Duomo, the medieval part of town. Cortona’s riches were astonishing and I waited for them to gather me in. In the meantime, I found a stone seat on one of the overgrown terraces, where the sun reached, and the wall beneath the jasmine was weathered, where I could read and write, and ponder.
The great stones of these walls that ring the town contain much of Cortona’s violent history. Built by the Etruscans in the fifth century BC, they were broached and reinforced by the Romans in the fifth century AD, then by the Goths sometime in the sixth century, until armies came marching across the plain from Perugia, from Siena, from Arezzo. In the thirteenth century, Cortona became una città ghibellina, with its own currency and familial links with the Florentines, and work began to drain the swampy, mosquito-ridden plain, to turn it into the fertile valley of the Valdichiana. I could map all this in the walls where my stone seat was. I could see, where the trains now ran, the plains the armies marched across.
I could hear the trains if the windows were open, and learned to tell the difference between the sounds of the Regionale and the Intercity in the middle of the night—or I liked to think I could. Every few weeks, I’d catch a Regionale to Arezzo, and stand in front of the great fresco cycle of Piero della Francesca’s, The Legend of the True Cross. Painted on the basilica walls behind the altar of the Church of San Francesco, the frescoes had been through fifteen years of meticulous restoration, which had revealed their subtle colours and minute details of fabric and foliage. The Dream of Constantine, with its radiant angel in the upper left hand corner above the sleeping emperor’s tent, promised a revelation in the silence before the dawn. But I lingered longest at the massed battle scenes on the facing wall, the terrified boys trapped forever, daggers drawn amid the decapitated bodies. The frescoes fed my sense of Italy as a place of violent extremes, of fortifications and burial mounds, of Christian armies and cemeteries outside the gates, of Mussolini and fascism, of nearby half-empty hill towns where partisans were lined up and shot in front of villagers and children, in landscapes of extraordinary formal beauty stretching to the horizon.
Then I’d walk across the square to the downstairs café for lunch, pleased I was apparently recognised and welcomed back. I had been there six years before with my husband, awaiting early proofs for his book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. We’d been invited to Italy by our friends Jan and Helen Senbergs, to stay in Posticcia Nuova near Arezzo. Jeffrey Smart and Ermes De Zan lent their villa to Australian artist friends when they were travelling for exhibitions or, in this case, to Seattle for The Ring Cycle. The deal was simple: they entrusted their friends with the care of four precious pugs, two peacocks and innumerable potted plants. Before they went, Jeffrey took us to nearby Arezzo, to view Piero della Francesca’s dramatic fresco cycle, then being restored.
They’d left us a copy of John Pope-Hennessy’s The Piero della Francesca Trail, which included Aldous Huxley’s essay ‘The Best Picture’, written in 1925, when ‘good and bad’ art were serious categories, and tourists were few. Now the Piero Trail attracts hundreds of thousands every summer, and Pope-Hennessy’s lofty erudition accompanies them everywhere on the trail: a short drive from Arezzo to Monterchi, then to Sansepolcro and across the mountains to Urbino.
And I was there again, aware I had become a watcher of couples: of women with husbands or lovers, of women travelling with women friends, one always in charge. I watched them being tired and irritable, sitting in silence, sharing a joke, quarrelling over shopping, arguing over directions. An occasional act of tenderness, a burst of laughter, a man kissing the top of his companion’s head, had me turning away.
Travelling solo is not at all the same as being always in company. There is a kind of bliss in no one knowing where you are. With no one to consult about time spent looking at something, or to share thoughts about what you are looking at, you are just another woman on her own with a notebook and pen, sitting on ancient bulwarks; voyeuristic, eavesdropping, scribbling impressions and meanings for herself.
When Lyndall was coming up to town, I would sometimes meet her at La Saletta, with its selection of newspapers. But most mornings, I went there alone, with a book and my little shopping list. I had read somewhere that shopping with a recipe in mind would help shape the day, get me out the front door. I had a cookbook my daughter had given me, and I practised a couple of Tuscan dishes—a fish soup, and something involving a chicken fillet and fresh olives. But, unless I had company, I still ate at the stove, or with a book propped up at the desk in the small sitting room; or outside, a panini in my pocket.
Cortona’s two fruttivendoli overflowed with seasonal fruit and vegetables from the farms on the plain. Asparagus and artichokes when I first arrived; then tomatoes and zucchini flowers, melons and strawberries; then Porcini mushrooms would rule for a fortnight after the first autumn rains. There was a weekly market for fish and cheese and herbs, where I went to unlearn planning for shared meals. The supermarket in the Piazza della Repubblica around the corner from the newspaper shop was the only source of bread and milk and groceries, and was overpriced and unfriendly, the people behind the counter watching me struggling to read labels and estimate quantities. I was relieved when Lyndall agreed with me, explaining they overcharged because they served so many foreigners. I was in that category until I had the use of a car, and could shop with the locals at much cheaper places down on the plain.
Cortona had one narrow, flat main street for shopping and eating, and the rest was a maze of steep lanes, stepped streets and sharp corners. By early afternoon in summer, the heat from the stones pounded the eyeballs and everything closed for siesta, and only a few small groups of women could be seen out walking. Lyndall had warned me the winters were grim: the wind howled and snow filled the lanes, and more than half the town’s bars and cafés, and all of the tourist shops, were shut. It took me a while to work out that there were two or more outlets supplying everything, so that vacations could be taken in winter, and the inhabitants not starve when the snow was falling and it was almost dark by four o’clock.
Lyndall gradually inducted me into the small-town mysteries of Cortona: the politics of the people I saw regularly in the newspaper shop, to whom she was the Contessa who bought the left-wing La Repubblica, instead of Berlusconi’s right-wing Il Giornale. I was struggling to read beyond the headlines, and fell on day-old copies of the Herald Tribune, out of Paris, for analysis and news of the war.
Lyndall showed me how to listen to the debates in parliament on Rai Gr Parlamento, which, I was pleased to discover, I often understood. I knew enough Italian to get by with the young man who came regularly to fix the intermittent internet connection, and with the bombola di gas man who came for the heating, and at the friendly little internet café where I printed my drafts of the Hashemite chapters. I would rework the chapters again before emailing them to Amman, where, I hoped, the summer intern from Boston was now helping Adiba.
I would learn to come and go easily between Rome and Amman, Florence and London, packing up my laptop and papers, and adding to the wardrobe I left behind in Cortona of linens and cashmere from its little shops. I had joined the line of refugees waiting in the sun in Arezzo for a permesso, irritated to be called out, and courteously fast-tracked. Vecchia turista and white, obviously; not like the anxious African and Asian families clutching documents, fractious children on hip and shoulder, being shouted at to stay in line. Then it was off to the Palazzo Comunale, for permission to be a residente regulare, with a bank account, and a town address I had arranged to rent for twelve months and perhaps beyond, able to leave snow boots and heavy coats in the back bedroom, books on the shelves, groceries in the cupboard and a suitcase of summer clothes under one of the beds.
One afternoon, I returned to the apartment to find a fat express packet in my letterbox—the medical reports from the Mercy breast clinic in Melbourne, which I’d asked for so I could show the doctor in Florence at my first review. The diagrams and bald description of slicing through breast tissue, locating a serious tumour, and slicing again; it was nothing I didn’t know, but they distressed me horribly. My breast was still sore, and I had to face the check-up arranged for me in a few weeks.
I had been making so light of what had happened the previous year that I had no one to tell how scared I was. Except for scratchy little emails about how the writing of his American-journey book was going, my husband had made no contact for months. The friends at home who had been through something similar and come out the other side were far away. Ruining the holidays of my eldest son, Rupert, and Sophie, who would be with me in June, was not on. I rang my daughter in Canberra, who said firmly I must tell them about the appointment before they arrived.
Instead, I rang my youngest son in London, who had been trying to get me to read a cognitive psychology book he used in his work with extremely depressed street kids, to help me analyse the attacks he’d heard me making on myself. Feeling discarded and ashamed, I blamed myself—so the theory goes. He said he would send me the book and instructed me to read it last thing each night. He then told me about a scheme he had introduced in London, and somehow got some funding for, to take young, miserable drug offenders skydiving—something to make them snap out of themselves. He told me they had to pack their own parachutes, and that the girls were much braver than the boys, some of whom he had to shove out of the plane.
A copy of the book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, arrived at the post office on the same day as a fat box set of Rostropovich playing Shostakovich arrived from my husband. No note in either and I do not believe in synchronicity, but both of them made me feel much better.
I decided to go to a concert I had seen advertised on a poster near the square. A cellist was going to play at the Chiesa di San Niccolò, the most beautiful little stone church in all of Cortona. I often climbed the hill to sit on its low stone walls out of the wind, shaded by beeches and chestnut trees, and listened to music on my iPod. The church was kept locked because inside was a Deposition by Luca Signorelli, and many other treasures. But this Saturday afternoon, a solo cellist was playing three of Bach’s great cello suites, Nos 3, 4 and, my favourite, No. 6 in D major. The church was packed with locals, and tourists from Germany and Scandinavia, who clapped and bravo-ed loudly and encouraged a long encore from the cellist. He played again the first movement of the 6th, with its deep, aching rises.
I took myself to Massimo’s that evening, to celebrate feeling better than all right.
Rupert and Sophie arrived in June on the midafternoon train, and I rushed to meet them. We travelled back together in a cab, planning the next ten days. Exploring all of Cortona and visiting Arezzo would almost be enough.
After a 28-hour flight and six hours’ excited sightseeing in Rome, they slept for fifteen hours. The apartment, with its spare bedrooms and a shuttered window onto a silent laneway, was perfect for jet-lagged Australians to sleep while I worked.
Then there were ten days of being a family. We lolled around the apartment, reading the English papers, went to the market for picnic lunches and climbed to the grass terraces above the town. We sat on the steps of the comune in the sun, drinking small cans of Peroni and eating perfect pizza. We watched Italian TV quiz shows, imitating the accents and trying to guess the clues. The Monty Python line ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’ was Ru’s contribution, and it became a family gag for ever more. We went to the Museo and the Accademia Etrusca. We visited the incorrotto Santa Margherita, of course, and my son, a paramedic, explained how it was that she was uncorrupted. He went to see the locked Etruscan tombs on the plain below, and persuaded il custode to show him around. He checked out the local ambulance service, and we all went into Arezzo, to see The Legend of the True Cross.
Rupert’s memory for slabs of Italian he’d picked up, his talent for mimicry of voices and body language, and Sophie’s flair for languages, delighted me. She shopped at the market, where her Italian was praised, and Lyndall invited her to tea at the Palazzone, and to play Scopa, on condition she spoke no English. I introduced them both around the town, bursting with pride.
And, of course, they accompanied me to Florence the day I had my check-up at the medical clinic, sightseeing while I went to see a kindly German gynaecologist, who took a full medical history, did breast scans, gave me a stress test, declared me healthy and strong. Hill towns are excellent for hearts, she said. All those steps. The scan results would be emailed to me—so, exhilarated, I went to meet my family.
And the email, when it arrived soon after, contained good news: Investigazione: Negativo. I texted Lyndall about the miracolo, and much later she told me she hadn’t known what on earth I was talking about. Carmen, ever discreet, hadn’t told Lyndall anything about me except that I was a friend.
Italian classes did not start until after Rupert and Sophie left, when there were enough tourists in the town. I went to language classes twice a week, with a well-rehearsed fictional version of Why I am in Cortona, what my husband does, what my work is. I did my homework but invented the answers. Not until I started walking in the hills with some local women, eager to practise their English and help me with my Italian, did I start to find my own way into the language.
It was those women who told me there was no word in Italian to distinguish loneliness from solitude. Both are solitudine, which is closer to wretched loneliness than to the often pleasurable, solitude. One of the women had been widowed years before. It was a lonely state, deplorevole, she said. I knew what she meant. Cortona’s cafés and bars treated me as invisible when I turned up alone; they kept me waiting, like bad news, or gave me a small, draughty table near the door. Eventually, I stopped going out to eat unless someone invited me, or I had a friend staying, or something to celebrate.
I was lonelier in Cortona than I had ever been in my life, except perhaps when I was fifteen years old and sent to be a lodger in the house my family had rented out when they went to live for a few years in the country. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. My parents hadn’t wanted to sell the house, their war-torn tenants were saving for their own, and I was hankering to return to my city school, and making their life a misery.
Then, I joined a household of kindly strangers. The house was very full—mainly of women, and dark furniture with mirrors. There was a handsome wife from Aberdeen, with gleaming lips and matching dark red nails; and her husband, a recent prisoner of war, whose hands shook as he lit cigarette after cigarette. Two unmarried sisters who had been through the London Blitz were sleeping in the dining room. And there was the pretty 3-yearold daughter, with her little frocks and hair ribbons—the light of all their lives. The only flaw was 15-year-old me, interloper and outsider, banished from a dream of home that was not there anymore, the light of no one’s life.
I ate my meals at the kitchen table. Then, awkward, lonely and feeling in the way, I would excuse myself to do my homework and write letters, reading for hours in the bedroom where my brothers used to sleep. The 3-year-old daughter, reasonably enough, had been assigned my pretty room, with its green-andwhite striped curtains and wallpaper, its view of the lilac tree and my father’s vegetable garden. I had a bed by the window on the dark side of the house, my books and photos on the windowsill, a table with a fluorescent reading light, and a wardrobe with a mirror that faced the bed.
A bookish girl with no one to talk to, who could only go home on the train at the end of term, I taught myself to grimace, screwing up my face very hard while looking in the mirror, to block tears and stop thinking the unbearable thought that I’d brought this banishment on myself.
Lyndall and I walked together sometimes, then began to swim in the early mornings, in Cortona’s town pool—a glorious stretch of blue on a high terrace beyond the town. When family and friends came to stay with either of us, we shared them too. We had English friends in common: Carmen, of course, who had published Antonia White, and writers and agents I knew from my publishing life.
One morning, Lyndall introduced me to Nella Gawrovska, when she’d stopped at the bottom of the hill on her motorino. Nella lived at the top of the town, near my favourite church, had no time for central heating or seatbelts, and only wore a safety helmet because she’d promised her son she would. She liked people to guess her age, which Lyndall said must be eighty-five. She was very fit; so fit that the local gym wanted to use her photo on an advertising hoarding, but her son said no.
We became friends slowly, in the summer walking down the hill through the terraces to visit Lyndall, swimming in the local pool, and, eventually, going for long walks into the mountains in our big boots. Nella once told me Australians don’t interest me in the least so I was at a disadvantage—but she was extremely curious about what I was doing in Jordan. She was a devout Catholic, who proudly voted for Berlusconi, and preferred monarchies, Lyndall said.
But she was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause, even to the point of anti-semitism. Her outrage about the theft of farmland by manipulating deeds of ownership for every expanding settlement was genuine and ferocious, perhaps because it was reminiscent of what the German occupation had done to her family’s lands. When Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine was published, and reprinted many times in English and Italian, Nella bought lots of copies, bestowing them on all her friends and expecting them to distribute them as well.
Although she had inherited great riches from her Italian maternal grandfather, Nella was extremely thrifty. She had an eye for a bargain, found all her clothes at charity shops, and charmingly coerced her friends into helping her. I sometimes shared with several chairs the back seat of her beat-up old car, holding the door handle closed as she sped across the Valdichiana, and waiting while she bargained down prices for restoration. I was never comfortable bargaining—too docile, she said; too Australian, she meant—but she taught me much about husbanding money, and how to get luggage on and off the trains, an art I badly needed to master, as the intercity train pulled in and quickly out again at Terontola.
One day, when we were travelling to Rome together—Nella, carrying a small rosewood cabinet for one of her apartments; me with several pieces of heavy luggage, heading for the airport—she showed me how to identify a group of young men from good families who were on the platform. And how to ask them graciously to help her and her cabinet on and off the train. Nella’s lordly manner was impossible to emulate but I got better at it.
I only half believed the stories she told me while we were speeding across the plain, of how her father, a Polish nobleman, had stuck it out in Communist-run Poland, although all his property had been confiscated and the family palazzo had become the Russian embassy. Not until her Italian mother’s courageous underground work for the Polish resistance was described in a long article in the London Times did I start to believe her stories and ask her more questions.
The overlap between the two worlds I was inhabiting kept surprising me. The Italian quarter in Amman had several cafés, restaurants and art galleries. It was near the InterContinental, where foreign correspondents hung out during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Maybe they still do.
So, I should not have been surprised to discover that Nella from Torino had an Italian friend, Gabriella, who had married a painter, Mohanna Durra, who lived in Amman. Did I know them? Nella asked. Of course I didn’t—but sometime in my second year, when the book was taking promising shape, I was introduced to them, and invited to dinner at their house with other members of Jordan’s ‘arts crowd’. Mohanna Durra’s Expressionist/Cubist paintings hang in public galleries in Europe and the Middle East, and he is a distinguished cultural diplomat and president of the Association of Fine Arts, Jordan. The ‘arts crowd’ Prince Hassan introduced me to reminded me of friends at home: witty, indiscreet, opinionated, arguing politics and ideas. I told Nella I’d met the Durras and she made immediate plans to visit Amman herself.
I returned to Jordan at the end of July 2007, with a new list of questions for Prince Hassan, and found him more determined than ever ‘to speak his mind for a wider public than Jordan’. The news from Iraq was very bad. The al-Askari mosque had been bombed and two of its minarets toppled. This is one of the holiest Shia sites in Islam and the reprisals would be dreadful. Sidi spoke at length on tape about the deterioration of regional security.
Sitti Sarvath was slightly cool to me this time and I wondered if she was concerned that her husband was ‘being political’. Someone in London had told me a story about Prince Hassan giving a speech at one of the universities. He was in full flight but he broke off partway through, saying, ‘I can tell by the look on my wife’s face that I am being political, so I will stop.’
The second book was going rather well but I still couldn’t talk about it in Amman. I needed another contract, or at least an addendum, but the office manager was vague when I asked him about it. Speak to Sitti Sarvath or Sitti Badiya, who will know what is needed. I forgot about it. Fielding questions became even more difficult now that I was being introduced to people in Jordan who would be speaking to me of their recent work with Prince Hassan.
In London again in August, I met with several publishers who had shown interest. But most backed off when I told them that there was to be no subsidy. The book we were producing needed to work in the market, so that it would be taken seriously, be reviewed and sell, and, in translation, be published out of Beirut.
I.B. Tauris, the London publisher selected later that year, had an impressive list of Middle Eastern titles. The publishing director had met Sidi Hassan before, ‘had always wanted to get a book from him’, and welcomed the idea of one that went ‘across the East–West divide’. A contract was signed by Prince Hassan in October 2007, for delivery of a draft manuscript in March 2008, and with a firm undertaking that Prince Hassan make himself available for promotion on publication. The contract was a fairly standard British one for a book that was still evolving. There were the usual clauses covering the process, including about delivering a draft in a ridiculously short time, the title, photographs, cover blurbs and my collaboration.
There were discussions with the family about promotion, as competing interests were obviously a concern: the Prince being called away for high-level talks, an important visitor arriving at short notice. I described to them the usual publicity campaign—an intensive week of interviews the publisher would arrange with television and radio stations, some prerecords. The schedule would need to be adhered to, and the publisher would be expecting the Prince to be available in London, where he and his family were often based for part of the summer.
The Prince’s youngest daughter, Princess Badiya, also met with the publishing people and with me when we were finalising the contract negotiations. A barrister, she was well known in London, in the world of fundraising for good causes and for interfaith and cross-cultural understanding. She offered to be one of several readers of the text. We met at her London house, to discuss the book’s progress and what she might be able to do to ensure its smooth delivery. I mentioned that my original contract didn’t cover the new book, which was very different from the first. She said she would be reading the draft with her father, when he was in London during the summer, as a way to keep the tight timetable on course. I was grateful for her involvement.
I saw Rajyashree Pandey and Sanjay Seth whenever I was in London, friends I cherished from Melbourne, who came to visit me several times in Cortona. Raj and I had met in India years before, when we were both speaking at a demanding arts and post-colonialism conference, with Ashis Nandi and others, in Pondicherry. Raj, an expert in medieval Japanese literature, was translating for Haruko Wakita, the pre-eminent historian of Japanese women in medieval Japan and an exponent of Noh theatre. We later explored some Chola temples, a period Raj admitted she knew little about. When she and Sanjay first visited me in Cortona and we went to Siena, I had to admit I was unable even to guess the identities of the saints in the altarpieces. Laughing a lot and admitting our limitations became a feature of our friendship.
They had recently moved to Goldsmiths University in London: Sanjay to take a chair in politics; and Raj to teach film and manga, and to finish her book on the body and gender in Japanese narratives such as The Tale of Genji. In London, we went to films together, and talked politics and post-colonialism late into the night. Sanjay’s work on ‘the situated-ness of our knowledge’ made me acutely conscious of the dangers of translating Prince Hassan into ‘my code’; that using his words, in his voice, was not enough. Prince Hassan, of course, was well aware of this. Hence the piles of books he’d gathered for me from his personal library; his emphasis on the difference of perspective from East to West; and the domination of the West, not only in the examples he quoted of inaccurate translation, but in institutionalised racism and cultural silencing. The readers he was arranging for the final draft of the book were an impressive line-up of men he’d worked with on important recent projects, and women whose professional attainments and connections were formidable. The Prince’s determination to say clearly what he wanted about the state of the Middle East was paramount.
In Cortona in mid December, I opened the shutters to sunlight bouncing off the snow-covered roof of the church opposite. The lanes and the Via Santa Margherita were deep in snow and impassable even on foot, so I worked and made marmalade for Christmas presents, remembering the recipe my mother and I had followed forever. The apartment smelled like home. When the snow sweepers cleared the steps, I picked my way through the street cats, now fed by old women and puffed up to twice their summer size, and bought many small jars at the charity shop.
The next afternoon, the snow plough had cleared the way, so I walked in freezing wind with Nella and Livia, the wife of the commander of Cortona’s carabinieri, along the Roman road through chestnut woods and snow drifts. Glorious. We went at Nella’s rapid pace, rugged up in hats with flaps, and heavy snow jackets. I insisted Nella and Livia speak only Italian, so I could listen to them. We sped along for an hour, and Nella fell on the ice twice but bounced back with no fuss. She hated being asked if she was okay.
The next night the wind was howling, so Nella picked me up in her old car to go down the hill to the Palazzone for supper. There I was to give Lyndall a lesson in using an iPod, which was my connection to the ABC and to all the music I downloaded before I left home. Nella announced she was already out of petrol, so we must roll down to the self-serve. That night, the bowsers would not take cash. Nella collared two ragazzi and ordered them to help. They were courteous, and tried their best and failed. I tried my card and it worked, dammit.
My daughter Sara and Peter, her partner, visited me on their way to an art residency in a castle in Switzerland. She was to return to Cortona for Christmas. Peter, who doesn’t much care for Christmas, would stay on in the studio. James was somewhere in Colombia, heading for Nicaragua; Ellie was with her family at home. Rupert had arranged for Sophie to return with Lucy, a school friend, for three weeks.
I met Sophie and Lucy in Rome, and we travelled back to Cortona with the girls practising their Italian, which was much more confident than mine. They took over all the food shopping, bought themselves hats and big scarves at the market, and planned our after-Christmas excursions to Perugia and Siena in the car I’d hired. We were also going to Venice on the train for a few days. When Sara returned to Cortona, we planned a Christmas Eve lunch for friends after discovering that the desk unfolded into a beautiful cedar dining table, which the girls decorated with real holly and ivy.
Christmas with family in Cortona was as I had imagined; the dream I’d had in hospital when the idea of heading off exploded in my head. Sara and I cooked roast chicken, stuffed vegetables and made tomato pie. Sophie and Lucy made an apple tart and cinnamon cakes, and rang their parents in Australia. On Christmas night, we watched a DVD of the girls’ school play, then all sat at the back of midnight mass in the packed Duomo. Back at the apartment, the girls Skyped and emailed family and friends. Homesickness is not an issue for a generation used to constant communication.
My husband rang, and spoke to us all in turn—the first time I had heard his voice since February. He sounded grim. His American book was in its last stages, the hot weather, the mosquitos from the lake nearby, Morry’s summer moulting. We spoke of his recent piece in The Monthly, ‘Society of Birds’, and the joy of watching them. Here, I reminded him, the Tuscan hills rang with the sound of gunfire from the first Sunday in September until the end of February. When we walked in the hills, we looked out for yellow jackets.
Then it was New Year’s Eve and freezing, but the snow held off as the Piazza della Repubblica was set up for a floodlit party, with fireworks and bands and dancing until 1 a.m. Sara had left again for Peter and Switzerland, and Sophie and Lucy dressed up. They looked much older than fifteen, and beautiful, and I was stricken by the need to protect them. We walked down together to the square at 9 p.m. and they promised to check in with me every half-hour. I sat, in my heaviest coat and woollen cap, at a table with several parents, and was offered a glass of wine and a slice of pizza. One of the fathers told me there was strictly no under-age drinking or drugs in Cortona—but I kept getting up to try to catch a glimpse of both girls. They checked in as promised, and waved from the moshpit as I tried to keep their blonde heads in sight. They emerged well after midnight, with several grinning boys in tow who told me courteously they had been practising their English. Many photos and exchanges of mobile numbers later, we made it back to the apartment as the music wound down. I fell into bed, leaving them Skyping friends back home.
Later, Lyndall lent me a small green car. The thrill of arriving at the top of the hill outside the town where the Porto Colonia opened in the wall, then navigating the Via Dardano and the maze of Cortona’s steep one-way streets to the point where the Via G. Maffei meets the Via Santa Margherita, then down the hill, scattering the cats, and into a car space outside my front door, which was, almost always, miraculously empty. There was nothing like it.
By the end of January 2008, I was alone again. I had sent off the first, rather rough, drafts to Badiya, Iradj and Adiba. Silence from everyone. I tried not to panic, and printed them off again and went to the café to read calmly. There were still lots of gaps, and texture to be included, more interviewing to do next time—but its shape was there and its voice. What I had set out to do, I very nearly had.
A week later, and the comments on the book were starting to come in. Nothing that couldn’t be dealt with. I kept watching the US primaries on CNN, praying that Obama wouldn’t get assassinated by the CIA or the crazies. Hillary Clinton’s managerialism and smug certainties lost me. I couldn’t see how peace would ever come to the Middle East with her at the helm.
Then, under the hoopla on the CNN screen, came news of two bombs exploding in pet markets in Baghdad. Two mentally disabled women fitted with suicide vests were detonated by remote control. Sixty-five people, mainly children and teenagers ‘excited by the birds and tropical fish’ were killed. The women’s heads were found ‘among the debris of feathers, fur and flesh’, said the reporter.
Back in Amman, there was a new sense of urgency around the project, which I tried to take advantage of. I had been sending more draft chapters through to the publisher, who seemed completely bemused that I should want him to read them at such an early stage—but I badly needed feedback from someone who understood the process. Princess Badiya was on holidays and busy, but she eventually rang me back with helpful comments on two chapters, and suggestions for extra interviews. She wanted me to get her father to speak more about honour killings and women’s rights. So did Senator Ina’am Al-Mufti. So did I.
It was arranged for the PA and me to go to the Jordan Rift Valley, where the precious water system fed the entire region. Dr Munther Haddadin gave us a splendid lunch at his orange farm, then took us to see the great dam he and the Crown Prince had built and flooded nearby, and on which the health of the agriculture and aquaculture systems depended.
This was to be included in the book, as a case study of one of the major agriculture and aquaculture projects capable of transforming the great Rift Valley, the elongated depression through which the River Jordan runs from its sources in modern-day Israel, through the Sea of Galilee, the Lower Jordan Valley, to the Dead Sea and to the Gulf of Aqaba. This was a regional project of immense importance as the refugee population expanded. Many small towns and farms were running out of water, which was only turned on for ever-shorter times. The rich stored water in underground tanks, and there was much corruption.
Then Mahomed Shahbaz, the president of the Badia Project, called for us one morning, and drove us north to near the Iraq border area east of Mafraq, to see the desert plantings that stabilised the fine soil of the badia. There was the impressive Environmental Research Centre, where camels were farmed and jameed made from camel milk, and to which schools went in large numbers. This, also, was a long and inspiring day. The fight was to save the badia by making it productive and ensuring the next generation understood its benefits. Both these national projects of great regional significance required detailed descriptions in Prince Hassan’s book.
I packed my bags, my notes and files, and copied the interviews and drafts onto a USB stick for safekeeping. And closed the door on a most productive time. I’d planned that the next time I was there, I would have finished the draft, and be starting to circulate copies to readers. In Italy, I could be much more focused, working mainly at a desk where I could concentrate, printing the drafts as the chapters were completed, then emailing them to readers. There the only interruption came from me deciding on going for a walk up the Via Santa Margherita and out the gate, or whatever took my fancy.
During my second spring in Italy, I decided I needed a motorino, thinking I would buy a second-hand one from Nella, who had several under her house at the top of the town. I really wanted a Vespa, which I’d learned the basics of riding back home. English George, Nella’s son’s father-in-law, was living in her guest house and offered to take me out into the countryside for a lesson on one of Nella’s old motorini.
We went to a car park, where I was shown the gears and the brake, after which I was out on the open road—not a main road but a narrow strada locale, which farmers used. I buzzed up the road happily, George in the car park rapidly receding in my rear-view mirror. Then a horn was blasting me repeatedly, from an agricultural harvester trying to pass. There was a ditch to fall into, or an unmade side road a good way ahead—which I made for, the furious tooting following me. When I managed to dismount, the immense weight of the old motorino dawned on me. No wonder Nella had fallen off. I decided against buying it, which, George told me, made Nella very cross indeed.
Undertaking to provide a first-draft manuscript ready for circulation to readers and the publisher by March 2008 sounds ludicrous, but, at that point, the promises of assistance were coming thick and fast. When I returned to Jordan in February, a small team was being assembled: a postgrad student intern to help Adiba with transcribing and checking; readers who had worked with Prince Hassan on some of his major projects; a businessman who regularly travelled with him; and the Prince’s close friend and Adiba’s father, Dr Ahmad Mango. Adiba’s mother, an expert in desert truffles, I had also met by this time, and I had been made very welcome in their house.
I was particularly pleased to have as a reader Miranda Tal, a magazine publisher with editorial skills, and the granddaughter of Wasfi Al Tal, a towering figure in Jordan’s history and three times prime minister, who had been assassinated in Cairo in 1971. Also reading the draft was Diala Al Jabri, who I had already met and with whom I’d shared my memories of seeing the beautiful Shatt al-Arab before it was blasted out of existence by Saddam Hussein’s Agent Orange. Diala had formidable internet research skills and a deep family connection with the region. She told me that it was she who had read online the Age column I’d written when the Howard government was hell-bent on making Australia part of the coalition of the willing. Both Miranda and Diala were unstinting in the help they gave me: reading the entire draft, making suggestions, both commenting that the text ‘sounded like Sidi Hassan’. This pleased me enormously.
The men read the sections that related to their work, and made helpful comments and corrections. Only Dr Mango told me that he disliked the draft, saying, ‘We want our Prince to sound like a Prince.’ A comment that was presumably conveyed to the London house where Prince Hassan and Princess Sarvath were now staying for part of the summer.
This became of great interest to me once I was no longer working for a monarchy. A prince who sounds like a prince is a useful commodity, perhaps. A prince who can be heard speaking from the heart, sounding like himself, could sound political, an agent of change. But I am once again reading behind the lines, sounding a little paranoid even to myself. Or just putting the best spin on what happened next.
One day that last summer, in June, a member of the London household conveyed to a member of the Jordanian household, who conveyed it to me in my apartment in Amman, that Sidi Hassan was in the London garden with his daughter, sitting at a table going through a pile of paper, looking very depressed. My heart sank. I had visited the London house several times and could picture the scene: a very depressed Prince was going through the most recent draft of the rather extraordinary little book we had managed to do against the odds.
I was in Amman. It was very hot and the Palace compound was quiet. Most of the foreign staff were on leave while Their Royal Highnesses were away. I had spent the last fortnight taking in changes the four readers had suggested and making corrections. There had been many discussions and emails back and forth with Princess Badiya in London, and compromises made. Now, at this late stage, these were morphing into firm instructions on matters I knew were sensitive and that only the Prince could decide.
‘This is your father’s book,’ I said several times. ‘He must tell me himself if he wants this change made.’ But he didn’t.
So, when her tone changed and she said, I am now ordering you to make them, I walked the long way around to the office, printed off six copies of the text, and left them with a USB stick containing the latest interviews and versions. I then packed my things, and asked the woman in charge of travel to get me on a flight to Rome the next morning and organise a driver to take me to the airport. I was very calm.
I slept on my decision, and travelled from Rome on the Regionale to Terontola, thinking hard. I sent a courteous email to Princess Sarvath, withdrawing from the project but offering to see the book through to publication in London when the family had finalised the text.
A week later, I sent a long email to Sitti Sarvath, explaining in detail why I had left the project when I did, and how I regretted that Princess Badiya’s role had not been made clear to me. Only late in the process did I understand that protecting her father from criticism was paramount. Nor had I anticipated that so much I had done in good faith would be undone, and that Sidi would change his mind about things he had been quite firm about—that the family would opt for a ‘diplomatic’, ‘dignified’, ‘appropriate’ book, rather than one that ‘spoke out’.
That was Prince Hassan’s prerogative, of course. As it was mine to withdraw; sadly, and full of regrets that I had not succeeded in what we had embarked upon. ‘Don’t let them censor me,’ he’d said, when he was speaking out about the pocket-lining and the politics. And I had.
I resisted emails from the family asking me to reconsider. A book by an independent public figure, a Hashemite no longer constrained by the role of Crown Prince, who could speak his mind about the fractured politics of the Middle East and make a contribution to public debate, was needed. My part had involved me in a round of interviews and conversations with Prince Hassan; a process, as he said, of getting inside his head. But, in the end, protecting him from criticism became the family’s main concern.
Weeks later, the Prince sent me a charming thank-you letter, with a big red seal, which I treasure, saying that I helped him reflect on the work he had done over the years, as well as to focus on his vision for the future. And that he was looking forward to our next meeting.
But I should not be writing about what had happened if I were constrained by the ruddy confidentiality clause in the first contract I signed. What it covered was impossible to determine. ‘Everything,’ said the lawyer the Society of Authors referred me to in London later that year. ‘It covers everything. In perpetuity.’ She compared it to writing about ‘the English royals’, in that special voice some English use to speak about their monarchy, and was puzzled as to why ever they had had an Australian ghost writer? Perhaps she thought I couldn’t understand something as special as a monarchy; that Australia’s failed referendum for a republic meant we were colonials still. I could feel myself getting angry, which was pointless.
So, I could not write about ‘making the book I’d been commissioned to edit’, and also not about the much better second book I had suggested to Prince Hassan, about his role in institution building and dealing with the present crisis of the Middle East. This should, of course, have been covered by a new contract, with no confidentiality clause, since I was writing it, and arranging publication and seeking translation. I was too absorbed in doing the book, in the short bursts of time available, to see to it, expecting the family would get around to a new contract later on.
How could I explain to this English lawyer that I walked away after a fortnight of being treated like an underling, a servant, then instructed to comply in a bullying voice? And not by Prince Hassan, but by a much younger member of his family; very much younger than my daughter, now I come to think of it.
Then, a few weeks later, I was told that the Hashemite entourage, including Mohanna Durra and Gabriella, was to visit Cortona to have dinner with Nella. I learned that Sitti Sarvath had told Gabriella Durra to tell Nella not to invite me. Lyndall was, of course, invited to dinner, and offered to stand up for me if my name were blackened. I drove to Sansepolcro for the weekend, to sit in front of della Francesca’s Resurrection, Huxley’s ‘best picture in the world’. I imagined the royal guards running around the town, checking for hazards; picturing the cars pulling up at the Porta Montanina nearest Nella’s lovely ancient house, with its rooftop garden where the table would be laid under the enormous old linden tree near the guesthouse.
I tried not to quiz Lyndall a few days later, when we visited the Bagno Vignoni to soak in the mineral baths and read in the sun. She was discreet, naturally, and only told me she thought the Prince was charming and that he said he was sorry I wasn’t there—and that Nella was in her element.